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Thursday, September 30, 2010

Comcast is the worst ISP in existence

I have fucking had it with my service provider. As a techie who has utilized Comcast for at the very least, 6 years, I think it's about time I shared my experiences with them.
Before I begin, I just want to note that I don't use Comcast willingly. There is no local alternative where I live, so I'm shit out of luck when it comes to a different service. So please keep that in mind before you tear me apart in my own comment section.

Anyway, on to Comcast. As I mentioned before, I've used it for about 6 years, at least that's how long I've used their internet service. Comcast is a provider that offers supposedly amazing customer service, quality assurance, and high speed internet that is always getting faster. None of this is true, not a single word of it. On the whole, I feel their customer service representatives and technicians alike, are entirely incompetent and incapable of doing their jobs, let alone providing customer service. I've dealt with these useless bastards regularly since I started using the service. Why? It never fucking works, Ever. Intermittency is what I have been getting all these years. The internet service only wants to work when it feels like it, and that is very rare. I have gone through at least 3 modems in the last 6 years. Not because of new models, or mandatory upgrades, but because all of them seem to suck and die. I find this interesting, because whenever you accuse the hardware of being the problem with your connection, the representatives automatically assume it is your own fault and the first thing they EVER want to do is reset it, and then send out a technician if it doesn't come on. Even if these methods get the connection working again, they do not grasp the obvious.

!Intermittency by definition means that said occurrence does not manifest continuously!

Comcast doesn't give a damn whether or not your service is intermittent. I have on countless occasions told them that Intermittency is my main problem. That, if they fixed it, or got it working I am sure it will start doing so again. (I have never been wrong in this regard, and my case history is littered with this statement)

If you tell comcast that you are having intermittency issues but you can currently connect, even slowly, this is what they will tell you. "All we can do is send a technician out to check on your connection and see if the modem is working properly". Now here are the issues with that:
-They are blaming your end, it is NEVER their fault.
-If they find something wrong with the connection such as a bad splitter, that they have installed or not. They will charge you for the visit.
-If the modem is at fault, and they can somehow pin the malfunction on you, you will be charged for the visit.
-You will be charged for the visit no matter what your case is
-It's a fucking INTERMITTENCY ISSUE
Regardless of what the technician does, whether it is switch out out all my cables, or my modem, or standing around with his thumb up his ass, the issue is never resolved. Also, I have been charged every single visit, even when it has been confirmed as their fault. Now at this point you could probably say "Well it has to be you then right? Nobody else has those problems".

Wrong. Nobody I've ever spoken to, locally or otherwise, has had a good experience with Comcast or their hardware. Their modems, are jokes. I ended up using a store bought one and that for the most part improved performance. Oh yeah, performance, you'll love this.

Comcast advertises their speeds as lightning fast. Now, I don't pay for "Xfinity" or their fastest speeds, but I do have one of their faster services. But here's the thing, I'm sure it wouldn't matter if I were paying for a 12 meg connection, a 54, the one I am now, or a 1000 meg speed. Because what my speeds are now are:

Awesome

That is pushing it I think. Because when I download something from say, Steam, an entirely legitimate source. I seem to be capped at around 130 kb/s. I've heard it's the same for everyone around here, so I'm not sure if it's just the local service trying to screw us over or not. But a couple years back, I got it on good authority that speeds in a central US state have the same issue. Comcast seems to think it's okay to limit connection speeds, despite what their customers pay for. They choke the hell out of all peer to peer connections, and do their best to make any form of heavy traffic physically hurt you. Now I'm not using some silly USB dongle (even though a grand majority of them are great), I'm using a linksys internal wireless card. With, a top of the line linksys router, which I have tested connection speeds on and it is phenomenal. Nothing about my network cards are slow, I've let acquaintances leech directly from my modem and receive the speeds shown above. This is simply the quality of the service, Comcast provides you with.

Service... Customer service is what Comcast absolutely seems to press most. In their ads, in every media, that's what they are all about. Their 'excellent' and unmatched 24/7 customer service. First off, good luck getting hold of one of these assholes. When calling their number, you first have to deal with an automated system. This dreadful thing loves to repeat itself, and tell you to try their website chat for support when your internet is down.

~fun fact: The system used to 'force' a remote reset of your modem if you said you were having internet issues. This modem is the same device that controlled your phone, see the problem? They eventually caught on and it is now an optional step.

If you somehow manage to get through the automated system, and the wait times, you have a 10% chance of getting a non-Indian representative. Please don't take that the wrong way, I have nothing against those from India, I just can't understand a word they say over the phone. But regardless of the accent, every representative is the same. Cold, heartless, and unhelpful. They will ignore any blatant knowledge you have and openly display when discussing your matter, and blame everything on you. They will defend their service to the end, and not even after going through an hour of troubleshooting will they admit that there may be an issue on their end. There is no such thing as rushed technician support either, a family member recently called them about having no connection and she was told that they would not send someone out until the next day. She explained that she was a retail manager, and a great portion of her job requires her internet to work. They in turn, informed her that she was SOL. So here is a summary. Comcast will not give you the service you are paying for, if you call and bring this up, they will not care, if you mention that your job relies on the service you are paying for but not receiving, this makes no difference. Isn't their customer service amazing?

If it wasn't already obvious from my rushed wording, bad grammar, sentence structure, and paragraph sizes, I wrote this as a spontaneous little vent. So please forgive the change in quality. But moreso, please consider all that is contained in this entry before considering Comcast as a service provider. Above all else, you should be fully aware of what you will get if you do so.

~as a sidenote, I'd like to thank whatever website hosted the picture I used as the header to this entry. I found it on google images, but didn't take the time to see from where.

20 comments:

been there, had some super techs at mine trying to get my internetz working. after 2 hours i told them to gtfo. As they already fucked up my system.Had to reinstall the whole thing + set up the internetz connection on my own. Since then i work out reguarly helps me not to rage about stuff like this. cheers.

You got my cousins experience with comcast perfectly. I have cable internet through Blue Ridge cable, and we have never had a big problem. The tech guys know what there doing, and the phone support is awesome. And my speed is always very close or at the 15Mb/s Down and 2Mb/s advertised speeds.